Taletha Derrington - Lurie Doctoral Fellow

Lurie Institute Doctoral Fellow Taletha Derrington, PhD'12, MA, successfully defended her dissertation and earned her doctorate. Her dissertation was entitled “Drug-Exposed Young Children and Early Intervention: What Influences Service Engagement?” She earned her MA in Developmental Psychology from the University of Hawai'i, a second MA in social policy from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and her BS in biology from the California Institute of Technology. She has focused her research career on systems, services, and policies related to very young children with or at risk for disability and their families, working on a variety of research and applied research studies of state Early Intervention Systems, natural learning environments for children with and without disabilities, children with Down syndrome, children with special health care needs, fetal deaths, and maternal substance abuse. Taletha was an Al Solnit Early Career Fellow with Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families, and a Frank and Theresa Caplan Fellow in Early Childhood and Parenting Education at the Heller School. Taletha's specific research interests include early childhood health and development, early intervention systems and policies, child welfare, disability studies, racial/ethnic disparities in health and development, and the connections between research, policy, systems, and practice for vulnerable young children and families.